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Soto, Areli

Writing 39B
Professor McClure
October 18th, 2015
RA: Prewriting and Exploration
Passage:
My God, it was hilarious!
He couldnt stop laughing; because it was more than laughter; it
was release. Tears flooded down his cheeks. The glass in his hand
shook so badly. The liquor spilled all over him and made him laugh
harder. Then the glass fell thumping on the rug as his body jerked with
spasms of uncontrollable amusement and the room was filled with his
gasping, nerve-shattered laughter.
Later, he cried.
Paragraph:
In the passage, Richard Matheson begins to vivid portray the
protagonist as a threatening, and even lunatic man as he vividly
describes his first scene of laughter through an extensive use of genre
expectations, repetitive language, long and descriptive sentences, and
contradicting phrases introduced at the beginning and end of the
passage to begin stating the horror genre in his writing by presenting
the protagonist as physically and cognitively threating, categorically
contradicting phrases, and vocabulary that satisfies the audiences
genre expectations, all of which help portray the protagonist as
threating and impure, which are all key elements that are stated by the
well-known philosopher of horror, Noel Caroll. The passage takes place
soon after Neville, the protagonist, had just finished shooting some
vampires, specifically Ben Cortman who reminded him of Oliver Hardy,
which apparently the protagonist finds hysterical. The author beings to
portray the protagonist as impure by introducing the contradictory
phrases he couldnt stop laughing and [l]ater, he cried, which
usually isnt what happens when someone is laughing. Then, the
author also uses several of vocabulary words that set the genre
expectations of horror to the audiences such as jerked with spasms,
and nerve-shattered laughter all of which are also very contradictory
to the scene since one does not do these actions when one is laughing.
Likewise, the author beings to portray Neville as both cognitively and
physically threatening by describing the constant and instant motor
reactions of the portrayed laughter of Neville, alongside with the eerie
setting of laughing while vampires are dying. The author of the famous
philosophical essay of horror The Nature of Horror, Noel Carroll, was
able to express the various of elements needed for a horror writing
piece. Carroll thus state the need of categorically threating elements,
such as categorically impure characters as well as physically and

cognitively threating to constitute a monster of horror, alongside with a


vest set of genre expectations to present to the audience, in order to
construct a successful horror piece (Carroll, 53-56). Therefore, the
elements that Richard Matheson implies in this passage of Neville
through his lunatic and threating actions, express how the protagonist
himself, can in the end turn into becoming, or is, the monster of the
story, or perhaps his very own monster.
Works Cited Page
Carroll, Nol. "The Nature of Horror." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 46.1 (1987): 51-59. JSTOR. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.

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